Positive reviews are great for your business. After all, whose words are customers more likely to trust—those of the company selling the product, or those of someone who's actually used the service or bought the product?
Some 90% of participants in a Zendesk study said positive online reviews influenced their buying decision, while 86% said their decision was influenced by negative reviews.
While a lot of businesses focus only on what to do about the one or two negative reviews they've received, the most effective way to combat adverse feedback is to increase the amount of positive reviews for your product or service.
So how can you get more reviews?
List yourself on review sites
Do some research to find the sites that are a good fit for reviews of your service or product. If you're a widget manufacturer, for example, seek out sites dedicated to reviewing various categories of widgets. You just need to search for your service/product name plus "blog," "reviews," "submit my product for review," and so on, and you should come up sites on which you can list your products.
We suggest listing your company on Yelp, for example, and then putting a Yelp badge on your website, which will make it clear you're on teh site and set up check-in offers to increase your customer's engagement with your business on the site. When customers check into your business on Yelp, the next time they log into the Yel site, they are presented with a reminder to leave you a review.
Make leaving a review as easy as possible
If your customers have to complete 10 steps just to leave a review on your site, they're going to be put off. You need to make the process of leaving a review simple with the least amount of steps possible for the best results.
We can set up a simple little form on your website for this purpose!
Make reviews visible on your website
If they are product reviews, put an image of the products and list the reviews with the item.
Be aware that "for unknown brands, reviews are critical for building social awareness to increase conversion rates and generally build trust from wary consumers. So make sure your great customer testimonials and reviews are easily seen on your product pages. You'll also find your product pages rank higher if you feature reviews because they'll have more unique content.
Provide incentive without bribing
Never pay someone to write a review for you; it's pretty immoral and dishonest. It could also backfire: If people find out, you'll be in hot water. Sometimes, a free sample, or a discount for your product, can be incentive enough for customers to write reviews, but never pay for a review, but be careful not to cheapen your brand or service with discounting as this may not provide the incentive you thought it would - instead docus on providing great, friendly, helpful service, quick delivery if applicable and a personal touch. For example are a product has been delivered or a service completed, send a personalised email to the customer asking them for feedback.
It's all about making your product and service stand out from the competition.
If you don't ask, you don't get
It's a sad truth that unless your product or service is either out of this world or diabolically awful, customers aren't going to be motivated enough to go out of their way to leave a review. Have you ever gone out of your way to write a review for something that's only OK? Probably not.
You really do need to reach out to customers and ask them to leave a review. Simply send an email asking them if they're happy with the goods and provide them with a link to the review page (again, make sure it's quick and easy to leave a review). That email also gives you a good chance to salvage a bad situation if the customer isn't happy with the goods: You could use this opportunity to improve things before they leave negative feedback. You never know... this small act could change their opinion.
Reach out to social media influencers and YouTubers to give reviews: You'd be amazed at the power YouTubers have to influence buying decisions, particularly in areas like consumer tech. Go on YouTube and search a phrase your potential customer might use to help research a purchase. For example, if you're selling Bluetooth headphones, you might search 'best Bluetooth headphones.' Sift through the search results and pick out the channels you think would be a good match for your product. Under the About section of the YouTube channel page, most YouTubers should have a business contact email. Send them a little information about your product and why you think they'll love it. Be sure to send a review sample if they're interested!
Automate
If you're a larger retailer with lots of customers (or if you're just very busy), it can be time-consuming to keep up with every customer buying from your store to ask how they found the product, but it needs to be done if you want to come across as a reliable, considerate seller.
There are tools tools can help you automate asking for feedback and reviews. Feedback Five and Reply Manager are both good choices. You can use them to automatically send your customers an email asking them to leave you a review and feedback, and Reply Manager is also great for general customer communication.
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Reviews are great for business: They provide customers with the reassurance that they are buying from a reputable seller, they contribute to search engine optimisation, and they can make your product pages look much more enticing.
It might take mere minutes to set up automated emails and list yourself on some review sites, so what are you waiting for?
